Programming large systems, such as big data systems, is relatively complex and thus often requires developers that have requisite skills to program such systems. For instance, many developers would like to perform big-data analytics using Map/reduce engines such as Hadoop® or parallel database engines such as Vertica™, which is available from the HP Vertica of Cambridge, Mass. However, many of the developers lack the necessary expert skills to perform such big-data analytics. To ease the task for developers, scripting languages such as “Pig”, which is a high-level platform for creating map-reduce programs, are being developed. These scripting languages are often automatically optimized and compiled to run either as a series of map-reduce operations on Hadoop®, or as complex SQL expressions on Vertica™.